Foundation AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICALCommitted to kids’ well-beingAPF Koppitz grantees are advancing child development research in such areas as autism and sicklecell disease.

BY TORI DEANGELIS

Before she was a graduate student at University of Maryland at College
Park, Kelly Lynn Mulvey worked as a
high school teacher in Durham, N.C.
There, she observed that a main worry
for kids was being excluded by their
peers.

“They wondered who was going tosit with them at the lunch table, whetherthey’d be invited to a party after schoolor what they should do if a bully washarassing someone,” she says. “Seeingtheir challenges really got me interestedin how I could help kids at a broaderlevel.”Thanks in part to a $25,000 ElizabethMunsterberg Koppitz fellowship fromthe American Psychological Foundation,she’s now able to do that. The annualgrants fund up to six scholars each yearfor promising graduate work in childpsychology.

Mulvey is examining factors that
drive children to exclude or support
peers who act outside the group norm.
She’s finding that children feel they
should confront the group if it is
shunning someone who is challenging
them on moral grounds — but are afraid
they’ll be kicked out if they do.

Such mixed findings intrigue Mulvey
and make her want to investigate the
area further, and eventually bring her
findings back into the schools.

“I’d like to educate parents andteachers about how we can give kids thetools to stand up and challenge theirgroup when they need to and still have arich social life,” she says.

Helping sickle cell patients thrive

Duke University graduate student Taryn
Allen is helping children with sickle
cell disease improve their cognitive
skills — a critical intervention for these
youngsters who tend to have cognitive
deficits resulting from disease-related
complications such as stroke and chronic
anemia.

The cognitive aspects of the disease
have received short shrift because
researchers have focused more on the
disease’s medical aspects than on quality-of-life issues, she says. “There’s been a
protracted history of health disparities
with sickle cell disease, both in terms of
the clinical care that’s been offered to
these children, and also the amount of
research done,” she says.

To help correct the imbalance, Allen
is testing a computer-based intervention
in these children’s homes that uses
engaging, game-like strategies to help
them sharpen their attention skills and
memory. The approach has already been
shown to help survivors of pediatric
cancer and children with attention
deficit disorder.

If it works, the intervention may havesignificant implications for children whoneed the support, says Allen. “My hopeis this training could help these kidsfunction better in school, and later on, tosucceed in the workplace.”

The bilingual advantage

Several studies show that bilingual
speakers have better executive
functioning and cognitive control than
single-language speakers, likely because
they must suppress one language in
order to speak the other.

Georgetown University graduate
student Natalie Brito is adding to that
body of work. Brito has found that
youngsters at 6, 18 and 24 months who
grow up in bilingual environments also
have better explicit memory — the type
of memory that requires conscious
thought — than monolingual children.
“Just hearing the two languages makes
a difference,” she says. She’s already
published the work on 18-month-olds in

Developmental Science.

Her research suggests that
bilingualism has positive effects in
many areas of the brain, not just those
associated with executive functioning.
It should also dispel concerns among
bilingual parents that they are
overloading their young ones with input,
she says. “The findings imply that it’s
not just OK to speak two languages with
your infant — it’s a plus,” she says.

Problems with generalizing
Why do children with autism have
trouble with language? Until now, many
autism researchers have looked to their
social interactions for answers.